Self-Scoring Quizzes

I have found some utility in teaching to be able to create small, self-correcting review quizzes based on students' current reading or other class-related material.

I have threfore created some web pages into which raw questions can be pasted or typed to generate such quizzes ready for use on teachers' web sites. I have made hundreds —possibly thousands— of quizzes for college freshmen using this software and have found the software reliable and the students enthusiastic. Some users have told me that what is available here is educationally superior to commercial products. (Examples are available on the Trivia Quiz Room page, although not all have been produced using the present software versions and some have been retouched after initial production.)

You may create quizzes for free using these quiz-maker pages.

Features:

Each quiz takes the form of an interactive web page which should be created here and then downloaded and placed on a teacher's site, where it can be accessed by students.

The Java-Script clockwork that evaluates each quiz reports the results only to the student. There is no provision to report anything back to the teacher. (Goal: Avoid student anxiety about the teacher noticing material not mastered; reduce student motivation to cheat by hacking the quiz.)

The format invites a student to modify potentially wrong answers and try again. However to avoid random guessing, various devices are used to limit the number of "free" guesses. (Goal: Encourage the student to rethink items missed, how confident any "guesses" were, &c.)

The number and (when it makes sense) the format of the questions is not fixed in advance. (If one multiple-choice question has 2 options and another has 10, it's fine.)

Each quiz is self-scoring and requires no attention from the teacher once it is posted to the teacher's site. (Goal 1: Students benefit from an immediate response, while they still remember why they answered as they did. Goal 2: The teacher's time is should be saved for teaching.)

Although created when a teacher pastes the questions and answers into a page on my site, the resultant quiz is designed to reside on the teacher's computer or server and is entirely independent of my site, which retains no trace of it. (Goal: The teacher is independent.)

Once-downloaded by a student into a browser-cache, no further connection to the server is needed. If desired, a student can save a quiz onto any computer with a browser. (Goal: Minimal on-line time is required for those using dial-up modems.)

Quiz-Makers & Examples:

"Think Again" Multiple Choice Quizzes are multiple-choice quizzes that report your total score, but not the correct answers, encouraging you to modify items until you get all of them right. (I have found that I use this most of the time.)
Links: Sample quiz, Quiz-Maker page to make new quizzes in this format.

"Cry Uncle" Definition Quizzes provide definitions and ask you to type in terms. If you get stuck, you can "cry uncle" by clicking in an "Uncle Box," which will provide the right term. Crying uncle too often, however, gets you called a "Crybaby" in the scoring box.
Links: Sample quiz, Quiz-Maker page to make new quizzes in this format.

"Matchmaker" Matching Quizzes arrange a small number of pairs of words to be converted into a traditional matching-style quiz. This is a very simple format both for creator and for user, and is sometimes considered childish and too "easy" for serious work, but that depends on the items included. Many people will find the two samples deliberately challenging.
Links: Sample quiz, Second sample, Quiz-Maker page to make new quizzes in this format.

"Linear World" Ordering Quizzes arrange a list of items in a different order (such as historical order, east-to-west order, size order, &c.). Simply input the items in the "correct" order, and the quiz will create an alphabetical listing and arrows that invite the student to raise them up and down until the correct sequence has been reached.
Links: Sample quiz, Quiz-Maker page to make new quizzes in this format.

"Flashcard Quizzes are much simpler. They simply include a list of terms. A student tries to formulate a definition of a term, then clicks on it and the teacher's definition appears in the answer box. At this time there is no system of scoring, but for the motivated student, it can provide a useful review tool, and it has good potential for use by pairs of students quizzing each other. The answer box does not permit cutting and pasting so as to discourage students trying to make sheets to be used in simple memorization. The format works well with large numbers of words. Up to about a hundred can potentially be accommodated.
Links: Sample quiz, Quiz-Maker page to make new quizzes in this format.

For additional sample quizzes, click here to visit my "Trivia Quiz Room." (Some of the quizzes in the Quiz Room were made or modified by hand and their format cannot necessarily be reproduced using the quiz-making pages.)

Script Hacking by Students

In these days of increasing computer sophistication, some students will be tempted to look at the source code either out of curiosity (which is probably good) or in order to find the answer to a question (which is probably bad, but is usually more trouble than it is worth). I have made no effort to keep the JavaScript at all obscure. (On the contrary I have made it as clear as possible so teachers can make modifications.)

Teachers seeking to avoid such behind-the-scenes exploration may wish to use encryption software to render the source code unintelligible while still allowing the web page to function normally.

A simple encoding program is WebCrypt Pro, available for about $40 from several distributers including Best Shareware. Such encrypting cannot be reversed, so encrypting programs usually make a backup copy of the original. Since these quizzes are designed to function off-line, the answers must be included in them, so no encryption program is completely secure against the assault of a determined, knowledgeable, and ingenious student hacker. WebCrypt Pro at least makes haking a much bigger chore than merely taking the quiz.

To see how encrypting works, you can view the same demo quiz in unencrypted and encrypted form. The two files should look the same and work identically, but if you use your browser to view the "page source," you can see the difference. (They were encrypted with WebCrypt Pro.)

Other Languages

Troubleshooting Quizzes With Other Scripts: Quizzes containing extended character sets occasionally do not work correctly. Here are some known issues:

Some of the programs (for example "Linear World") arrange some items in alphabetical order. This is not always correct for non-ANSI letters. A work-around is to create the quiz questions with dummy letters as the first words of the relevant items, and then to correct the running text (not variable names) in the completed file.

Although the HTML header specifies the output page as following the world-standard UTF-8, it does NOT add the invisible lead-in code, so it will actually be "ANSI as UTF-8" unless you modify it with your own software. In most cases, this should not matter.

Some encryption software, as noted, can also choke on some characters in a few languages. I have had difficulty with UTF-8 files using an extended character set. If you are working with languages other than English, you may wish to check this. Pre-encrypting conversion to extended ampersand format may be needed.

Even more than with English quizzes, it is therefore essential to work each quiz you create to be sure it behaves as anticipated.

For obscure reasons, translations of this page (but not of the quizmakers themselves) have been made and are available as follows. Note that because they seem to have been produced as translation exercises, the translated pages are not normally updated, and live links in them simply refer to the same English pages linked here.